What's In a (Band) Name?

How many times a day on Facebook do you encounter the comment “That would be a great band name”? I encounter it entirely too often!

Like fashion, band naming conventions are cyclical. When The Beatles first came along, bands were commonly called [Lead Singer] & The {Nouns]. The idea was that a name that took 30 seconds to say bestowed an air of gravitas. A group that advertised in the Santa Monica pawnshop turned music store in which I used to hang around waiting to be discovered called itself Only Alternative & The Other Possibilities. I audtioned for them without success, but that was just fine, as the only good thing about them was their name. But then, a decade later, bands realised that shorter names tended to be put on marquees in larger letters, and instead of Paul Rodgers & The Middlesborough Mangetouts, say, you had…Free. Then The Lovin’ Spoonful and Jefferson Airplane made the world safe for non-plural names, and the whole world went mad, as witness Sixpence None the Richer. 

I think the worst name in pop music history was that of the group to which Bjorn Ulvaeus belonged before Abba — The Hootenanny Singers. On the other hand, behold the sublime genius of The Swinging Johnsons. The best album title in the history of recorded music is of course Joe Walsh’s sublime You Bought It, You Name It.

In Los Angeles just a few years back, I was in a group provisionally called Thee [a wee homage to East LA’s Thee Midniters] Vexations. –Tions names evoke Motown for me, as I think they did for Elvis Costello when he named his little band The Attractions. I’d wanted The Well Hungarians, but discovered that there was already a band with that name. Singer Richard Steven Black, the best male singer in LA, and a supremely nice guy, suggested we change it to Caviar On a Ritz, but then he left the band, and I wanted to call the revamped version The Romanovs because I thought it sounded cool, and because the girl singer was a Russki. The bass player, whom I was fast becoming less and less able to stand, fervently objected because Vladimir Putin is Russian, and homophobic, so the name was sure, in his mind, to offend any gay prospective fans. Behold what I had to contend with! I can't work in these conditions!

I moved back to the UK again, thinking the band I was going to have with my spouse would call itself Zelda & The Deathgrips, a name she’d devised in 1977 for a punk band she’d never got around to actually forming. (My own idea for a punk band, which I used in an unproduced screenplay, was The American Lesions.)  But wouldn’t you know it? There was a hip hop group back in Oakland, California, called The Deathgrips. I decided instead on The Freudian Sluts. For years, I’d amused myself, whenever anyone, uh, misspoke, by declaring, “Freudian slut. No! Slip!” I thought it so wonderful and hilarious and original that I didn’t bother to look on YouTube, on which I was later horrified to discover that someone had beaten me to the punch. I didn’t tell the rest of the band for fear of appearing a numbskull..

I believe the best band name I ever came up with — one I bestowed in 2005 on my recording project with the celebrated Essex (UK) jazz singer Debbie Clarke, was Do Re Mi Fa(Cough). My inspiration was my discovery that Johnny Rotten had written The Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant because he wanted to hear himself shouting, “Cunt!” (“We’re so pretty, oh, so pretty va-CUNT!”) on the radio.

I envision a day when corporate sponsorship will come to band-naming, and big corporations will sign up promising bands called, for instance, Samsung Presents Johnny Finite & The Denouments, as I intend to entitle my next project, even though I’m pretty sure everyone will pronounce it “denim mints”. But that’s fine, of course, because it will enable me to feel superior, in a sort of shallow, pathetic way. Having spelled Ulvaeus correctly without checking makes me feel pretty darned terrific about myself too.

[Don't miss the Samsung Presents Johnny Finite & The Denouements single, soon to be recalled] Swinestein. And FFS buy some of my books, please.]